Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

In short: Invisible Agent (1942)

1941. German agent Conrad Stauffer (Cedric Hardwicke), “Japanese” “Baron” Ikito (Peter Lorre, as we all know the most Asian guy in Hollywood at the time, Austria being so very close to China or Japan) and their henchmen have a nice little talk – with assorted introductory torture – about a certain family invention with one Frank Raymond (Jon Hall). Raymond changed his name to Raymond from Griffin, and the film usually calls him the grandson of Frank Griffin, the Invisible Man, even though Frank was the brother of the original Invisible Man. Far be it from me to suggest a Universal movie doesn’t give a crap about even the simplest facts surrounding what came before in a franchise, so let’s just pretend “Grandson of the guy who helped Vincent Price become the second Invisible Man” would be too difficult for the tiny brains of an audience to comprehend.

Anyway, Frank manages to escape the bad guys’ clutches, delivers news of the affair to some kind of military gentleman, declines to deliver the invisibility serum to the US military (because bah, gas chambers, who cares, one can’t help but mentally add), but quickly changes his tune after Pearl Harbour, for once Americans are getting killed moral compunctions aren’t important anymore. However, Frank still has one condition: only a single man shall be treated with the serum, and that man must be him! Because this is a movie, various Allied higher-ups agree with the plan, and quickly, the Invisible Amateur, I mean Agent, is on a mission to Berlin to find out all available information about a coming Japanese/German attack on US soil.

Will he bumble around even worse than you expect the amateur he is to, and risk his invisibility cover on the tiniest of provocations? Will the film awkwardly shuffle between portraying the Nazis as fools even more bumbling than our nominal hero and actually evil? Will Stauffer and Ikito just happen to become involved? Will there be an attractive woman (Ilonay Massey) in the spy business for our hero to romance? Will character actors like Albert Bassermann and J. Edward Bromberg try their best working from a particularly sloppy Curt Siodmak script? You betcha!

Turning a version of the invisible man into a propagandistic war time hero obviously made a lot of sense in 1942, and of course suggests to the excitable mind further movies only made in an alternative reality like “The Wolfman Howls at Himmler” and “Dracula bites Hitler: Perhaps not the best idea”. Alas, what Universal and director Edwin L. Marin deliver here is quite a mess, featuring a hero so incompetent he is threatened even by the most Keystone Koppish of the Nazis, and Nazis the film never can decide are bumbling fools or terrifyingly effective evil. It’s a tonal problem that isn’t helped by the Universal love for bad slapstick, nor by the film’s episodic structure, where single scenes can be quite impressive but no care seems to have been taken with actually turning these scenes into a narrative with a coherent mood. Which of course, war time propaganda or not, does fit perfectly into the way Universal treated its fantastic films after The Wolfman, disposable trash good enough for the peasants to spend their money on but not important enough for the studio to put any effort in.

Past Misdeeds: Mad Love (1935)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), the lead actress in a rather dubious looking play, is the not so secret object of affection for the genius but mad surgeon Doctor Gogol (Peter Lorre). Yvonne doesn't do anything to dissuade Gogol, because to her knowledge he is not doing anything more creepy than visiting each of her performances and sending her flowers every night without trying to meet or molest her. What Yvonne doesn't know is how affectionate Gogol is when he's slavering over that wax figurine of hers that's standing in the theatre's foyer.

The two finally meet on the day of Yvonne's final performance. It is only then that Gogol realizes that his object of obsession is married to the pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) and is really quite repulsed by the good Doctor's less than model-esque appearance and creepy demeanour when confronted with it closely.

Still, Gogol does take the whole business with as much composure as someone with his mental problems is able to show. The surgeon seems willing to be content with buying wax Yvonne (who at least has a reason to be as lifeless as Drake is) and leaving the breathing woman in peace.

That could be that, but unfortunately, Stephen's oh so precious hands are hurt in a train accident and the only way to save his life seems to be amputation. Yvonne goes to Gogol and begs for his help. The surgeon can't resist the woman's shrill, melodramatic exclamations, but he knows he can't save Stephen's hands in the way his object of adulation wants him to.

What he can do, and secretly does, is give Stephen new hands. Too bad that those are the hands of the knife-throwing killer Rollo who just had a close acquaintance with the guillotine.

I say too bad because Stephen very quickly develops the tendency to throw knives at people that displease and annoy him while losing the ability to play his beloved piano again. When he goes to Gogol for help, the by now quite mad surgeon gets a brilliant idea how to acquire himself a real, breathing Yvonne.

Mad Love is the last directorial effort of the brilliant director of photography Karl Freund, and I would call it his best work in the position. To me, it is possibly his only film as a director where he isn't a director of photography trying his hand at directing, but a real director, by now knowledgeable enough to put state of the art cinematic techniques and his experience in German expressionist filmmaking to excellent use. When it comes to visual style, Mad Love is one of my favourite films of the era, full of little details that heighten the tension and bring Gogol's state of mind to the front.

There is also much to love on the design front - I'm especially enamoured of the insane costume Gogol dons to try and fool Orlac into thinking he is Rollo, back from the dead with a freshly stitched-back head, and the set design for Gogol's home, all its rooms a little too empty, all doors a little larger than they should be.

Even better than Freund and the art design is Peter Lorre. Lorre is doing another step on his way to be forever typecast as the psycho here, but his performance is so nuanced that even the worst moments of over-ripe dialogue (and gosh, there's a lot of that here) just plain work. In fact, the purpleness seems to be part of the way the doctor defines himself. As Lorre plays him, Gogol is as frightening as he is pitiably, and I think the way he creates a very human monster and not just a monster is something people doing serial killer movies today should really take a good look at, instead of just looking at Anthony Hopkins doing the bug-eye. Of course, there's always Criminal Minds doing it right/more interesting, but I digress.

What for me put Mad Love down below the status of lost classic are two things. Firstly, Lorre's performance might be a career high, but he is the only one really doing much of anything with his role. Drake's only mode of acting is being shrill and melodramatic, and Colin Clive, as we know from Frankenstein perfectly capable of doing an excellent job, is badly hampered by the second - and bigger - one of the film's problems, a really bad script.

Sure, as you can see from the plot description, there are a lot of great, even subversive ideas in it, but the execution is in parts execrable. This begins with the overblown-even-for-1935 dialogue and ends with the absurd way poor Colin Clive's role is handled. In theory, he is slowly driven mad by his inability to learn playing the piano again, hurt by money troubles and the feeling that his hands just aren't his own anymore, but as the film shows it, he goes from "person we have never seen" to "mad, tittering wreck" in seconds. And, you know, that's quite a problem when your film wants me to believe in a plot that hinges on his state of mind. Instead of exploring Orlac deep enough to make him as interesting as Gogol, the script prefers to waste its running time on throwing two OCR characters at us in the form of Gogol's alcoholic (and what could be funnier) housekeeper and an especially dreadful comic relief reporter.

It's a wonder that the film still is as good as it is, really, but the raw talent and determination of Freund and Lorre win out over the trite and the unfunny.

Just don't think about how great the film could have been with a good script.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,peter lorre,karl freund,colin clive,horror,melodrama,reviews

Black Angel (1946)

When bar singer Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) is murdered, quite a bit of circumstantial evidence points to her lover Kirk Bennett (John Phillips) as the murderer, enough so that the glorious American justice systems sees fit to sentence him to death.

Ironically, the only one who believes Kirk's insistence on his innocence is the one he's been lying to all along, his wife Catherine (June Vincent). After the sentencing, June decides to put all her energy into finding the only piece of evidence that could exonerate Kirk, a heart-shaped broach Mavis's killer took with him. Her investigation leads Catherine to Mavis's estranged husband, the pianist and composer Marty (Dan Duryea). Something about June pulls Marty out of the alcoholic stupor that is his usual state of mind, and convinces the alcoholic to help the desperate yet gutsy woman.

The trail leads the new partners to bar owner Marko (Peter Lorre, obviously having a lot of fun with his pasted-on cigarette). Marko may or may not have had good reasons of his own to kill Mavis. Catherine at least is convinced Marko is hiding the broach in his safe, so she and Marty develop a plan to get closer to the man and his safe 70s Bollywood would approve of: they turn into a singer/pianist duo (quite like that of Mavis and Marty once were) and hire on in Marko's establishment. Things don't go as planned, of course.

Ray William Neill's Black Angel (based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, like so many other noirs) is a very fine, b-list Universal noir that contains so many elements typical of what we now think of as part of the noir genre, listing them may make the film sound like a parody, or at least as a pretty dumb series of clichés. Thanks to Neill's atmospheric direction and a script that contains quite a few moments of cleverness and hidden depth, nothing could be further from the truth, for if you do it right, you can make clichés sing like the truth, while certain improbabilities of plotting always seem to be rather the point of film noir anyway.

Of course, when it comes to helping me ignore improbabilities and clichés in a movie, a nice ensemble of actors like the one working here is useful too. Duryea, Vincent and Lorre in a good mood - like they are here - would be more than able to convince me of much less believable things, like politicians not in the pocket of big media corporations.

While the film contains more than enough inventive visual moments - Neill sure loves transitions that are more than just cuts to the next scene, and does put an equal amount of effort in meaningful framing of scenes, which gives the whole affair a pleasant visual flow that only breaks when it is supposed to break - this isn't one of those noirs where the emphasis truly lies on the visual side of things.

Neill seems more interested in the subtextual load his script offers, and the way it plays with and sometimes against certain noir stereotypes. Just to take an obvious example, this isn't a film where a male main character is seduced or beset by a femme fatale (though one could argue that the typical male lead in these films really seduces himself), but rather one where the absence of the femme fatale creates a void at least one of the male characters needs to fill.

From a certain perspective, Black Angel is a film exploring its lack of a living femme fatale. It is certainly no accident that Marty seems to attempt to turn Catherine into a woman very much like his dead wife, nor will it come as a surprise that Catherine loses more of her scruples the longer she stays in the role men seem to want her to play. The film's not so crass as to have her turn "bad", but it's still a clear part of the set-up. I'm of the opinion that the femme fatale in most noirs isn't so much the deadly and infinitely ruthless monster the films pretend she is, but a useful foil on which the genre's male main characters can project their own weakness, and Marty's creation of his own private femme fatale here looks like a point in favour of that idea to me.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,roy william neill,dan duryea,june vincent,peter lorre,noir,reviews

Mad Love on WTF-Film

Today on WTF-Film, my write-up of the best directorial effort of masterful director of photography Karl Freund, with one of the best performances of Peter Lorre, and I still find reasons to grumble.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,peter lorre,karl freund,colin clive,horror,melodrama,reviews,other places